If the “Internet novel” or “Instagram novel” are ascendant genres in today’s literary marketplace, Tolstoy Together is an impressive nonfiction cousin. It sits merrily on the fence between a type of collective criticism and a commonplace book filled to bursting with clever ruminations and quotations. - The Smart Set
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University collected more than 86.6 million comments from more than 6.5 million users on 200,000 YouTube videos, then analyzed them using an AI technique normally employed to translate between two languages. - Wired
It was the details, many of them none too plausible, that were true; the larger outline of the stories and characters were what was made up. - The Atlantic
This indigenous tongue of northern California was severely endangered by the early 1900s, and efforts to revive it didn't begin until the 1970s (and didn't really take off until the '90s). Now there are high school and college classes in Yurok. - The Guardian
It happens every few months, somewhere or other, with a reliability approaching a new genre. Someone, usually working for a large media company, devotes considerable resources to excavating an obscure story of relatively low public interest. - The Guardian
Gurnah, who is from Tanzania and lives in Britain, said, "People don't come with nothing, they come with their youth, their energy, their potential. ... Just to stay on the idea 'they are there, they are coming to steal something of our prosperity' is inhumane." - Le Figaro
Can the physical, print book continue its run this year? Independent bookstores would really like books to keep selling, even when people aren't trapped at home. - BBC
Where were the limits exactly, in what was deemed to be a case of poetry plagiarism? How many lines that emerged while writing, any poet might ask, could be traced back to some half-remembered source? - LitHub
"In early-1950s America, Donald Webster Cory had probably the largest L.G.B.T. mailing list in the country, and maybe in the world." (Mr. Cory was not, strictly speaking, a real person.) - The New Yorker
"They show how Asians in different parts of the continent invent and exchange words within their own local contexts, then introduce these words to the rest of the English-speaking world, thus allowing the Korean wave to continue to ripple on the sea of English words." - BBC
"'Satire ... does not come with some kind of manifesto for a better world. It tells you what's wrong; it doesn't tell you what you should do.' So political satire often sets out to do as much damage as possible, to sweep away." - BBC
Audiobooks aren’t cheating. They aren’t a just-add-water shortcut to cheap intellectualism. For so many titles in this heyday of audio entertainment, it’s not crazy to ask the opposite: Compared to the depth that can be conveyed via audio, does the flat text version count? - The New York Times
The author of ten novels, born and raised on Zanzibar and resettled in England as a refugee in the 1960s, was cited for "his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents." - The Guardian
